Taiwan Tea Odyssey

This tea was supposedly a 1997 Xiaguan tuocha. Which is a bit older than the Xiaguan teas you typically run into. It was fairly cheap and was easy to throw in my online shopping cart one evening. I didn’t give it much thought.

The first clue that something was amiss should’ve been the price. A bit too cheap. Then more importantly, the pictures of the wrapped and unwrapped tea. If I had known better, it would’ve been pretty obvious that it’s not a 1997 tuocha.

Sometimes you just buy tea on a whim. When it comes to online tea shopping in Taiwan, which is just very easy and convenient, it can be dangerous since there’s so many options and close to zero curation. In this case, I was low on hongcha, which I drink in the mornings, and so late one night was poking around on Shopee (an online marketplace for vendors, a bit like Amazon). Before long, I’d loaded up a cart and noticed the vendor also had a 1997 Xiaguan tuocha for a reasonable price. So, into the cart it goes.

With a tea like this, from a major producer, it’s easy to research and basically make sure you’re getting what you think you’re getting. For instance, to figure out the rough market value. And with a bit more effort, to track down reference photos. Which is not to say there aren’t counterfeit wrappers, but it’s still helpful.

So, looking at these two wrappers, they’re similar, but with notable differences. The older one reads “Yunnan tuocha” (云南沱茶) across the top, whereas the newer one reads “Xiaguan tuocha” (下关沱茶). Also the design and placement of “jiaji” (甲级) on the sides is different (and switched from simplified 甲级 to traditional 甲級).

This is basically all you need to know to figure out that the tea on Shopee is not what the vendor claims. But then also, and this is what made me really feel like a fool, there was this picture in the original listing:

Note the neifei, with that little bit of green peaking out, i.e. the G-shaped design associated with Xiaguan FT productions, a collaboration that began in 2003. Even without knowing the subtle differences of the wrappers, this should’ve been a dead giveaway.

Before moving to Taiwan, when I was buying from western-facing online vendors, I didn’t really worry about this kind of thing. Yes, there are still cases of deception and flat-out fakery. But because there’s fairly few western-facing online shops to begin with, there’s a degree of curation that’s easy to take for granted. Once you make the jump to platforms like Taobao, Shopee, Ruten, you just have to be more careful.

So the tea turned out to be a Xiaguan FT7643-3+1, a pretty common production from 2004. And priced about right for what it is. It’s actually not that bad, and the storage is surprisingly decent. So, it could’ve gone a lot worse. And I think in most cases, it does. Lesson learned.